Do you think the people who are looking it up really don`t know what it means?

I think that sometimes people look up words in the dictionary because they don’t know what it means, but many times, people are going to a dictionary because they know what it means but they want to check to see if it means exactly what they think it means. There are a lot of reasons to look up a word in a dictionary beyond, “I don’t know what it means.”

Now in terms of complicit, I understand you’ve identified a number of spikes in searches for the word. The first came after an episode of Saturday Night Live.

Saturday Night Live made a perfume commercial spoof. It was starring Scarlett Johansson as Ivanka Trump and it was selling a scent called Complicit.’The tagline for this scent was, “The fragrance for the woman who could stop all this but won’t.”

As It Happens

Saturday Night Live creates ‘Complicit’, the fragrance, for Ivanka Trump

LISTEN

00:00 00:07

SHARE

Now, this is something that I came across in my research as we were trying to decide what we were going to pick for word of the year because it spiked in our data.

It was on March 12, the day after that Saturday Night Live [episode] aired. It spiked 10, 000 per cent. So there was a 10,000 per cent increase in look-ups the day after that aired for the word complicit.

There was another spike. This one also involved Ivanka Trump after an interview she gave to CBS News. … She didn’t know what it meant to be complicit. Maybe she was one of the people looking it up.

I don’t know if she was, because she came up with her own definition for what it means to be complicit right before she said that. When asked if she and her husband were complicit in the actions of her father, she said, “If being complicit is wanting to be a force for good and to make a positive impact, then I’m complicit.”

As It Happens Ivanka Trump on what it means to be ‘complicit’ LISTEN 00:00 00:18

SHARE

This is really not at all what complicit means. Complicit is decidedly a negative term. At its core, it’s a word about responsibility and culpability. It’s a word about being held accountable for actions, behaviours and views. And here, she’s saying it’s about being a force for good and that’s not at all what it means.

After Ivanka Trump used the word ‘complicit’ during an interview, Dictionary.com saw a spike in people looking up the term. (J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press)

One thing that he says is “silence can equal complicity.” And I think it is really really interesting and I think it’s true. Silence can often equal complicity. But sometimes, silence doesn’t equal complicity.

There are many, many good reasons why someone might stay silent. It could be about fear of retaliation, fear of endangering one’s safety or one’s loved ones or knowledge that nothing will change.